


The Brink

by moonlighten



Category: Original Work
Genre: End of the World, Gen, Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-08 01:54:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21227858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonlighten/pseuds/moonlighten
Summary: The first time he sees the darkness, it is just a tiny black speck caught in the empty space between a storm-grey cloud and the wispy lineation of a contrail.





	The Brink

* * *

The first time he sees the darkness, it is just a tiny black speck caught in the empty space between a storm-grey cloud and the wispy lineation of a contrail.  
  
He rubs at his eyes, thinking he might have got an eyelash or piece of grit stuck in them.  
  
The speck remains.  
  
It must be a floater, then. He's had them before; they're annoying but not harmful. He doesn't think about it again for the rest of the day.

* * *

  
  
  
The next day, however, the speck is a little bigger. It looks like someone has dropped the vast bowl of the sky and knocked a chip out of its bright blue glaze  
  
"Have you seen that?" he asks his sister when they meet up for a coffee in their favourite café.  
  
"Seen what?" his sister asks.  
  
"That black spot in the sky," he says, pointing towards it.  
  
His sister peers out of the window beside their table, then licks the pad of her thumb and rubs it against the glass.  
  
"It was just a bit of dirt," she says. "All gone now."  
  
But it isn't. The glass might be clean, but the blackness is still there.  
  
"I can still see it," he says. "It's up there, not down here."  
  
His sister laughs. "I think you need to get your eyes checked," she says.  


* * *

  
  
The optician runs all of the usual tests, makes him read out letters of ever-decreasing size, studies the curves of his corneas, and sits him in front of a machine that blows tiny puffs of air into his eyes.  
  
His eyes are perfectly healthy, she tells him, and his vision is still 20/20.  
  
Everything's fine.

* * *

  
  
  
By the weekend, the blackness is same diameter as a ten pence piece held up to the sky at arm's length.  
  
It looks like a peephole cut through the atmosphere so that the universe can look in. He watches it most of the day now, expecting to catch a glimpse of a giant eye peering through or some enormous creature possessing entirely too many tentacles and teeth shifting beyond.  
  
But there is only the blackness.

* * *

  
  
  
Midway through the next week, half the sky has been obliterated and people start disappearing.  
  
Whole aeroplanes full of businesspeople on their way to meetings, athletes en route to competitions, families setting off on their holidays just gone. Men, women, children, and babies all vanished.  
  
Everyone has a theory about it. Talking heads on the TV pontificate about weather patterns and electrical faults. Online theorists spin vast webs of conspiracy.  
  
"It's aliens," his mum says as they drink tea together in her fusty, doily-strewn living room. "They're abducting people and the government is covering it up."  
  
"It's not aliens," he tells her, and his sister, and even his boss at work. "It's the hole in the sky. They're all falling through it."  
  
They all look dutifully up at the sky and then back at him, wary and concerned. His mum suggests he makes an appointment with his doctor.

* * *

  
  
  
His GP sends him to hospital for tests. They stick him in an MRI machine; run an EEG.  
  
They don’t find any abnormalities, and his brain waves are normal.  
  
He's perfectly healthy. There's nothing wrong.  
  


* * *

"It's probably just stress," his best mate says over a pint at their local. "You need a holiday."  
  
He doesn't know where he would go or how he could get there. The sky has vanished now, and the blackness has started biting chunks out of the horizon.  
  


* * *

By the end of the month, his street has vanished too. The blackness laps at the end of his driveway and stretches out for as far as he can see beyond it, as cold and fathomless as an ocean.  
  
There's nothing on the telly anymore, or the radio or even the internet, so he doesn't know what any expert might have to say on the matter (or, indeed there are any experts left to have an opinion on anything at all).  
  
To him – ignorant, ill-informed, and so fucking terrified by now that he never sleeps anymore – it seems as though some vast intelligence or law of physics so complex that he's never likely to understand it has realised that there's some fundamental flaw in reality and it needs to be erased. The page ripped out, crumbled up and disposed of, so  
  
It may not be today, or even tomorrow, but sometime soon the entire world will be gone.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> This is another one of those fic ideas that came to me in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep. As it seemed seasonal, I decided to write it up!


End file.
